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JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

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Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#151

Post by fapjacks »

simula67 wrote: post #62

> It turns out it’s useful to have a lingua franca for the web. No, I don't think so. Most people do not use JavaScript since it is useful. They use it since it is the only option available on the browser. There is a BIG difference. > Creating desktop apps in JavaScript lets developers choose from a vast range of freely available code libraries and frameworks, which takes much of the grunt work out of coding Lots of…

I smell an agenda in the comment from the person with the username "simula67"... (this is a joke, by the way)...

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#152

Post by sotojuan »

simula67 wrote: post #62

> It turns out it’s useful to have a lingua franca for the web. No, I don't think so. Most people do not use JavaScript since it is useful. They use it since it is the only option available on the browser. There is a BIG difference. > Creating desktop apps in JavaScript lets developers choose from a vast range of freely available code libraries and frameworks, which takes much of the grunt work out of coding Lots of…

> I mean, I am sure that there are people out there making a living on JavaScript, but please, take one for the team. Learn something else. I hear it is a hot market for developers.

Where I live JS jobs are some of the highest paying actually. If anything people are moving to it.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#153

Post by bbcbasic »

dccoolgai wrote: post #100
niftich wrote: post #40

The salient points of the article: - People are stuffing websites into Electron and packaging it as a native application - HTML/CSS/JS is considered 'hackable' because it's widely understood by today's semi-power-user audience Although the article doesn't say it, this seems to imply that: - Full-native development unique on each platform is considered too much effort, when you can get a cross-platform app with Electr…

What makes JS more "hackable"? Someone find that cartoon about the gaunt-looking guy and the laid-back kid when the girl asks them to hold her coffee and link it [edit: http://i.imgur.com/76Wtthy.jpg ]. ...Because it gets the hell out of they way and holds your coffee for you and doesn't slap it out of your hand and throw a tantrum because it was actually a medium coffee ...and it gives you the simplest no-BS object/…

Hmm not convinced.

Is it pleasant UX that you can put petrol in your diesel car because the nozzle fits? Would it be pleasant UX to have your bank let someone withdraw money from your account without ID? Bleach bottle with no safety cap?

Also the laid back kid of JS will throw a tantrum if the coffee is not a coffee. He'll throw the tantrum at your customer though (at runtime), not your developer (at compiler time). Which arguably is a good UX for coding but not the bottom line.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#154

Post by t1amat »

rzzzt wrote: post #136
niftich wrote: post #40

The salient points of the article: - People are stuffing websites into Electron and packaging it as a native application - HTML/CSS/JS is considered 'hackable' because it's widely understood by today's semi-power-user audience Although the article doesn't say it, this seems to imply that: - Full-native development unique on each platform is considered too much effort, when you can get a cross-platform app with Electr…

There is no "View source" button for native applications, and you can not modify them and see the results immediately.

This is not true. Electron comes with the full suite of Chrome Dev Tools (CTRL-SHIFT-I is default when enabled). You can certainly achieve a live-coding experience with Electron[1].

[1]: one of many boilerplates - https://github.com/chentsulin/electron-react-boilerplate

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#155

Post by axlee »

amorphid wrote: post #144
alexwebb2 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe this is the top comment. Let's go point by point: 1) JavaScript has its warts and its gotchas like anything else (okay, maybe a few more). So what? Spend 50 hours building anything substantial with JavaScript and you'll get a good handle on them, and you'll be good to go for the next 10,000 hours. Same goes for just about any other language. Focusing on the weird edge cases might make for a nice blog…

>> Spend 50 hours building anything substantial with JavaScript and you'll get a good handle on... I don't mind MY JavaScript. It's everyone else's that drives me bonkers. Tracking down things in JS is a timesuck of epic proportions. Much of the time, it just isnt't any fun.

> I don't mind MY JavaScript. It's everyone else's that drives me bonkers. Tracking down things in JS is a timesuck of epic proportions. Much of the time, it just isnt't any fun.

You should look into typescript, it has helped us quite a lot with that particular matter.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#156

Post by tracker1 »

Udik wrote: post #150
noxToken wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first started learning JavaScript, I wondered how people became proficient at the langue with all these weird quirks[0] that don't raise errors. Turns out that there are a bevy of things to help combat these quirks. Two of them are strict mode[1] (which can be scoped[2] in instances were libraries/frameworks would fail running in strict mode) and linters. Strict mode and linters do not fix everything. This is…

> I wondered how people became proficient at the langue with all these weird quirks[0] (links the usual loose equality table) Why don't you all just use === instead of ==? Tell me, how long does it take to learn it?

There are plenty of times where you want ==, or for that matter, any falsy/truthy expression in JS... about the only points where I have issues with some of the defaults for falsy/truthy come down to the number 0... Outside that, I find that there are times where I'm dealing with inputs that can be a string or number, and the coercion can be handy.

I would never suggest people start learning programming with JS first... although, there is the huge benefit of not needing more than a text editor and browser (already on their machine) to get started with it. One area of JS that I HATE is Date... it sucks, it's woefully incomplete and moment-timezone is huge to download in a browser.

The primitives, coercion and a lot of other bits of JS I really appreciate... but === vs == is pretty low on my list... that said, I tend to prefer the airbnb eslint preset, so it makes me use it anyway.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#157

Post by t1amat »

sanderjd wrote: post #55
niftich wrote: post #40

The salient points of the article: - People are stuffing websites into Electron and packaging it as a native application - HTML/CSS/JS is considered 'hackable' because it's widely understood by today's semi-power-user audience Although the article doesn't say it, this seems to imply that: - Full-native development unique on each platform is considered too much effort, when you can get a cross-platform app with Electr…

Yeah I find the "hackability" question really interesting. It is incredibly neat that I can hit a few keys in a browser and get an editable live source of what I'm looking at which is, to some extent, declarative and easily mappable from source to output. Yes, this is less true as more sites rely heavily on minified javascript for all of their implementation, or incomprehensible (to me) css that hides or moves things…

ALT -> View -> Developer -> Toggle Developer Tools

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#158

Post by [deleted] »

sanderjd wrote: post #55
niftich wrote: post #40

The salient points of the article: - People are stuffing websites into Electron and packaging it as a native application - HTML/CSS/JS is considered 'hackable' because it's widely understood by today's semi-power-user audience Although the article doesn't say it, this seems to imply that: - Full-native development unique on each platform is considered too much effort, when you can get a cross-platform app with Electr…

Yeah I find the "hackability" question really interesting. It is incredibly neat that I can hit a few keys in a browser and get an editable live source of what I'm looking at which is, to some extent, declarative and easily mappable from source to output. Yes, this is less true as more sites rely heavily on minified javascript for all of their implementation, or incomprehensible (to me) css that hides or moves things…

[deleted]

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#159

Post by falcolas »

Udik wrote: post #146
falcolas wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it is extremely successful because it's not a bad language. Perhaps not a bad language, but I do think it falls into the same category as PHP - just good enough. It's just good enough to do what we want it to do, and given the lack of choice, we're willing and ready to pile abstraction upon abstraction upon it to try and reduce the pain involved with getting work done. And like masochists, we look at the result…

I don't think you know what you're talking about. PHP, up to version 4 at least, was hardly even a language. More like a collection of macros. Javascript, despite a few ugly gotchas, is an elegant language with a few simple rules that allow for an impressive degree of freedom and flexibility.

> hardly even a language. More like a collection of macros.

You just described Forth, and a good portion of Lisp. Both of which are great, groundbreaking, and productive languages.

> an elegant language with a few simple rules that allow for an impressive degree of freedom and flexibility

Very eloquently said. However, compared to other dynamic languages like Lisp, Perl, Ruby, and Python, it doesn't strike me as particularly free or flexible. The ability to create and use DSLs directly within those languages really displays true flexibility and freedom, IMO.

Of course, you don't always want unlimited flexibility and freedom in a language; it's why a particular type-safe languages with a very restrictive borrow checker is so popular.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#160

Post by __derek__ »

reitanqild wrote: post #65
gr3yh47 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python would like a word with you about point 1)

Java as well for basically anything but iOS. C# might even cover that now.

Xamarin, I reckon?[1]

[1]: https://www.xamarin.com/

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